The Dream

by Harry Bernstein

  If she had expected that this joyous news could have a softening effect, she was mistaken. ‘Tickets?’ he said, with no lessening of the anger. ‘What tickets you talking about?’

  ‘To go to America.’

  ‘Who the bloody ’ell wants to go to America?’

  He had said this before. He had made it perfectly clear that he had no intention of going to America. He had never shared that dream and there was obviously no sentimental attachment on his part to the relatives in America, his father and mother, his brothers and sisters. Perhaps this was little wonder. They had abandoned him once in Poland. They had done the same thing here in England. Of that he was sure and it rankled deep inside him. Things he had said before had indicated that. There were things he said now.

  There was unmistakable bitterness in his tone: ‘What the bloody ’ell would I want to go to America for? To see that rotten bunch there? Do they want to see me? Like bloody ’ell they do. They can all rot in ’ell for all I care. You can go if you want. You can take your bloody little bastards and go. Do what they did. Run off. Go!’

  ‘You mustn’t talk that way,’ my mother said in a low voice. ‘I’m sure they all want to see you. The past is past. You must try to forget the past. This is our big chance. If they’re as bad as you think they are they wouldn’t have sent us the tickets. It means they want to see you.’

  ‘Like bloody ’ell it does,’ he shouted back at her. ‘I’ll bet you one thing. I’ll bet you there’s no ticket there for me. I’ll bet you anything.’

  ‘Yes, there is,’ she said, louder now and more certain of herself. ‘I saw it. Here, see for yourself.’

  She took the tickets from me and handed them to him. But instead of looking at them he threw them on to the floor, scattering them all over and cursing: ‘You can stick your tickets up your arse. That’s what I think of ’em. And you can go to ’ell, you and your little bastards, for all I care.’

  My mother had given a cry of horror as he threw them down and I myself rushed to retrieve them, but as I bent down my father launched out with a foot and gave me a hard kick in the behind that sent me sprawling on the floor; then he stomped out of the room and went back upstairs.

  My mother helped me to my feet and the others, who had remained silent and shocked by all this, joined in picking up the pink steamship tickets. Then I, with a sore behind and hatred in my heart, went outside and I must have walked for miles trying to drive it all away, but thinking all the while that some day I was going to kill my father.

  One good thing came out of this: the thought that since my father was not going with us we would be free of him for ever, and all the fear and hatred for him that had hung over us ever since I could remember would no longer be there. It gave me a feeling of immense happiness and, because I knew that scene this morning had thrown a shadow over my mother’s joy, I talked with her about it later in the evening.

  She had decided that the first thing she must do was write a letter of thanks for the tickets, so I was sitting in my usual position at the table in the kitchen opposite her with the writing pad and the ink bottle in front of me, and the pen in my hand, when I brought it up before she had begun. ‘You must tell them he’s not coming,’ I reminded her. We always referred to him as ‘he’ or ‘him’, never as ‘Father’ or ‘Dad’ or any of the familiar terms that children use for fathers.

  My mother, deeply buried in thought about what she was going to say, looked up at me and stared for a moment. ‘Why do you say he’s not coming?’ she asked finally.

  I was a bit surprised. ‘He made it plain enough this morning,’ I said and rubbed my behind a bit ruefully. It was still painful.

  She saw me and understood. ‘He’s your father,’ she said.

  ‘Does that give him the right to kick me in the arse?’ I asked.

  ‘He can’t help it, I suppose,’ she said. ‘He’s been treated roughly himself from the time he was a little boy, younger than you are now. It’s the only way he knows.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘He’s got no right to kick me like that. And I’m glad he’s not coming with us to America.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that,’ she said.

  I looked at her, surprised and with a faint disappointment settling inside me. ‘He said he wouldn’t go.’

  ‘He says a lot of things that he doesn’t mean.’

  The disappointment deepened. ‘Then he’s coming?’

  ‘We’ll have to see.’

  That was all she wanted to say about it, so we turned back to the letter and I dipped my pen in the ink bottle once more. ‘Dear —’ she began and halted.

  ‘Who are we writing to?’ I asked.

  She was puzzled. ‘Who did the tickets come from?’

  ‘The envelope had the name of a travel agency in Manchester,’ I reminded her.

  ‘I know that. But didn’t they tell us where the money came from? Look in the envelope. There was a letter from the travel agency. Maybe it’s in there.’

  I looked. I took out the tickets, the letter, all the other literature the agency had sent us with information about the trip we were going to make. There wasn’t a single word as to who had sent the money.

  We began to conjecture. Not Grandma – she was not the Bank of England, nor did she have the crown jewels when she left England. With this caustic statement still fresh in our minds she was eliminated from the start. And if not Grandma then certainly not Grandpa, for he would have less to do with anything than anybody. So who, then? Uncle Abe, who had three suits of clothing hanging in the closet and a beautiful wife with electric lights and a bathtub? But he with his boasting would surely have let us know that he was paying for the tickets? What about Uncle Morris, who was such a nice man and wrote such pleasant letters when he did reply, and his wife Leah, who wrote too, sometimes, in his place and gave us such a cheerful picture of their life in America – though never saying a word about the tickets? Or Aunt Sophie, who was nice too and had recently married a barber named Sam, who was supposed to be quite well off? Hadn’t she once said that she’d love to see us all? And Uncle Barney, the comedian of the family, who wrote such funny letters, once suggesting that we all take swimming lessons and maybe swim across the Atlantic Ocean to America?

  There was name after name that came to us. Uncle Joe, Uncle Harry, Aunt this, Aunt that, until we’d eliminated virtually every one of the ten members of the family including their spouses without coming up with one that we knew for sure was our benefactor.

  It was a complete mystery, and the letter had to be put off until we found out, so I put away my pad of paper and ink bottle and pen in the drawer of the dresser, and my mother went back to her clothes washing in the scullery.

  Chapter Three

  THERE WERE NO secrets on our street. People had been living there a long time and everybody knew everything there was to know about everybody else. It was, after all, just a small, cobbled street with only two long rows of houses facing one another, all the houses linked together under a common slate roof, with short, stubby chimneys sticking up at the top of each roof in a straight line.

  The street looked like any other street in the poor section of a Lancashire mill town, with the rows of brick houses all the same, but there was a difference about ours because it had two distinct sides, one occupied by Christians, the other Jews. An invisible wall the imaginary barrier that separated the two sides and kept us apart.

  And yet, despite that, the cultural differences, ancient enmities, the two sides got along quite well, and when news got out that we had received tickets to go to America there were almost as many Christians as Jews who came over to shake our hands and clap us on the back, to congratulate us and tell us how lucky we were.

  There was a great deal of excitement throughout the entire street. After all, how often was it that any family left the street? On the Christian side, especially, there were families whose houses had been passed on from generation to generation. The Jews had come later
, after being driven out of Poland and Russia and a few other European countries, and they had found refuge here on this little street, which they would not think of ever leaving.

  But to be able to go to America! Others may have shared my mother’s dream. Certainly, there was envy among them, and it only doubled my mother’s happiness and caused her cheeks to flush with pride at being so fortunate – for once in her life.

  Among the people who came over from the Christian side to congratulate us were the Forshaws and I’m sure that when they came my mother felt the same awkwardness she had been experiencing for a long time at their presence on the street, and after she had shaken their hands and chatted a little, they too perhaps concealing their embarrassment, and when finally they had gone, my mother took a deep breath of relief. She liked the Forshaws, everybody on the street did. They shared their gramophone with the whole street on summer nights, leaving their door open while it was playing so that everyone could hear. They did things like that and my mother could not have had anything against them. Except that they were Christians – and their son was married to her daughter, and there was a grandchild that was half-Jewish and half-Christian.

  A secret romance between my sister Lily and Arthur Forshaw had carried on for years, and there had been a secret marriage at a country inn called the Seventeen Windows. When my mother found out she collapsed from grief and went into mourning, for a Jewish person who marries outside his religion is considered dead, and we all sat shiveh, which is the ritual for the mourning for the dead, and requires that you sit every day for seven days in a darkened room in your stockinged feet and say certain prayers.

  Eventually my mother relented and went to see the baby that was born to Lily and Arthur, and we, together with the Forshaws, even gave a party for the whole street to celebrate the birth, and it was one of those rare times when the two sides of our street came together as one, and it was really a very wonderful thing. But then things got back to normal again and once more there was that distance between the two sides – the invisible wall – separating us and that you could never seem to get rid of, and for my mother there was constant embarrassment knowing that the Forshaws, who lived directly across from us, were relations – and Christians. I have wondered if this did not add to the urgency of her desire to go to America. I am sure, however, that she must have felt tremendous relief knowing that she would not have to be faced with this awkwardness again.

  But we were not going yet. When all the excitement had died down and we were able to think more soberly, the realisation came that there was more involved to travel to America than steamship tickets. There was the rail trip to Liverpool and the much longer one from Quebec, where our ship would land, to Chicago. There were numerous other expenses, the cost of passports and taking pictures for the passports, and above all, clothes.

  ‘We can’t go to America looking like beggars,’ my mother said.

  She would remember those words later and the irony they contained. But she could not have thought of it then and there were other things on her mind. She worried day and night. Where were we to get the money from to pay for all the things we needed? Our benefactor – whoever he or she was, and we could not seem to find out from the travel agency – had given no thought to this problem and my mother was at her wits’ end to know where to get the money. There was no use asking my father. He wouldn’t have given it even if he had had it, and he still would having nothing to do with going to America. So what was she to do? Totalling up the amount we needed, it came to pounds and pounds.

  For a while it looked as if the dream, so close to fulfilment, was to be snatched out of our hands. But my mother would never have let that happen. She had faced other adversities before this and had overcome them. She would do it again.

  What she did was a desperate move, and one that elicited wails of protest from us and roars of anger from my father, but it was the only way out for her. She began to sell what little broken furniture we had, together with all the ornaments and everything possible that somebody might want. With still one month to go before our departure, we found ourselves without a table to eat on, without chairs to sit on, without our beloved sofa, torn and flattened but precious to our comfort. Cups, saucers, even the teapot – they all went, and the clock with two angels clinging to either side, which had been on the mantelpiece for as long as we could remember, that too went.

  We cried and protested, but what could she do? My father stormed and cursed America and all his relatives there, but that was nothing yet. He would soon be without a bed to sleep in and would have to sleep on the floor. We would all have to do that. The house emptied itself out bit by bit. Our neighbours from both sides of the street bought most of it and I think that in many cases it was an act of charity on their part rather than need.

  I recall one time when my brothers and I were carrying a dresser across the street to the Forshaws. They had bought a number of things from us before this and my mother had been surprised that they had chosen the dresser, since it was in such poor condition, with drawers that did not open or close and the paint worn off here and there. But they had bought it, saying it was just what they needed, and now we were carrying it across the street to them, the three of us sweating a little with its weight, when in the middle of the street the back fell off. And there in the doorway were Mr and Mrs Forshaw looking at us. We came to a halt, not knowing what to do, the broken back lying on the ground.

  Then the next moment Mr Forshaw was approaching us, pipe in his mouth and a hammer in his hand. ‘Don’t worry, lads,’ he said to us cheerfully. ‘We’ll get this thing straightened out in a minute.’

  He had brought some nails with him too, and it was just a minute that it took for him to get the back of the dresser into place again, this time more securely than before. Then he helped us carry it into his house, with his wife once more exclaiming, ‘This is just what I’ve always wanted.’

  But in spite of all the help we got from our neighbours it still wasn’t enough for the clothes that we had to buy, and the shoes, and then to have a little left over when we got there so that we didn’t have to borrow money from the relatives, from my grandmother especially. Yet there was nothing else to sell – except the shop.

  Perhaps this had not occurred to her before. Maybe, if she had given any thought to it at all, she resisted parting with what had meant so much to her. It had saved our lives once. Could it do it again? I do not know what was in her mind, but one afternoon, when I was in the shop helping my mother clear out what was left of the rotted fruits and vegetables of her stock, Mrs Abrams, who lived a few doors away, came in with two young and rather small people, a man and woman.

  I was big for my age, taller even than either of my two brothers, so the couple who followed Mrs Abrams into the shop may have seemed smaller than they were. They looked like a little boy and girl to me, but they were a married couple and the man was Mrs Abrams’s nephew. They were from Manchester, Mrs Abrams explained, and they were recently married and were looking for a place to live and set up a bakery. The man was a bagel maker, so he was looking for a Jewish area and he thought our street might be the right place for him.

  I saw my mother’s face light up. ‘My shop is just right for you,’ she said. ‘I have mostly Jewish customers and they’d all want bagels. Where can you get bagels in this town?’ This was true. I myself hardly knew what a bagel was.

  My mother added that she herself would give anything for a bagel, especially one that was hot and fresh and just out of the oven. Mrs Abrams agreed with her. This was a good street for them. Even the Christians might learn to eat bagels.

  And as this talk went on, the couple grew a little excited, the man especially. He was an excitable person to start with. He began to talk, quite rapidly, and to jerk his head around as he did so, like a rooster pecking away at the corn on the ground and the hens around him. Mostly his talk extolled the virtues of bagels. He believed they were healthy, good for you, but more than that he believ
ed they were a symbol of Jewish unity, that they brought Jews together and reminded them of their heritage, and further, he went on, English Jews had been deprived of bagels for generations and he felt it his religious duty to bring bagels to them.

  On and on he went, and my mother’s cheeks began to flush with hope, and perhaps in that moment she saw the shop as a solution to her problem, and she interrupted the little man to cry out, ‘So then you must buy my shop. It’s the perfect place for you. It’s more than a shop. It’s like a club room. All the Jewish women come in here to sit and talk and drink my sour milk. Isn’t that right, Mrs Abrams?’

  Mrs Abrams, huddled in her shawl, nodded her head vigorously. ‘It’s like a shul in here sometimes. I come myself, especially on a rainy day, and when the fire is lit it’s nice and cosy, and we sit and talk for hours.’

  ‘Do you have a good oven?’ the baker asked.

  ‘Do I have a good oven?’ my mother cried. ‘I have a wonderful oven. I bake a lot of cakes myself and bread too. Come and see it.’

  She led them into the kitchen and I followed. The little man was more excited than ever when he saw the oven. It was big and black, the door well polished. My mother had baked some wonderful cakes here, especially for the holidays. The house would be filled with its aroma and spread even to the upstairs, and you could smell it as you went to sleep.

  There was no question that the baker was impressed, and he began to jerk his head about this way and that, looking around the kitchen, opening and closing the oven door, peering inside, looking at the fireplace, peering up into the chimney, sizing up the place no doubt as a future workroom.

  I saw his wife pluck at his sleeve and take him aside. She whispered in his ear. I have very acute hearing. I heard what she said: ‘Don’t be such an idiot. Stop liking everything. She’ll only charge you more.’